Griffin and the Spurious Correlations
Griffin and the Spurious Correlations

Griffin and the Spurious Correlations

Chapter 1 of a whole new book begins on [Totally Fant­ast­ic Title]. Intro­du­cing, Griffin and the Spuri­ous Correlations.

This book is prob­ably the most fun I ever had writ­ing a story. Well, I guess it is tied with The Pageant — A Battle Maid­en’s Cun­ning Stunt. That was a hoot too. Griffin I found easi­er to write than the Gate­keep­er series, in part I think because it’s con­tem­por­ary. It’s a hel­luva lot easi­er to come up with similes and meta­phors when you don’t have to worry about ana­chron­ism. Plus it was just great fun to let my ima­gin­a­tion take over. The events that hap­pen in the book just kind of flowed unin­ter­rup­ted out of my fin­gers, the pen, the key­board, whatever. There was noth­ing in the way, no obstacle, noth­ing block­ing the ideas. It was enorm­ously fun to write, and after get­ting com­ments from four beta read­ers, it was enorm­ously fun to revise and rework.

And the really inter­est­ing thing is that ages after writ­ing this book I read Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat, which is a book on story struc­ture aimed at writ­ing film, but it can be applied to writ­ing nov­els as well. I am not a pro­ponent of writ­ing a story try­ing to jam it into The Her­o’s or Heroine’s Jour­ney, or whatever story struc­ture out­line the­ory you like. I’m more a fan of writ­ing the story instinct­ively and then see­ing how it aligns with one of those the­or­ies, and mak­ing adjust­ments if you feel like it. I read Save the Cat long after fin­ish­ing Griffin and was kind of blown away at how closely it aligned with Snyder’s beat struc­ture. So that was kind of cool. Just an obser­va­tion, really.

Only it was then that I real­ised the truth: I star­ted out writ­ing a con­tem­por­ary fantasy nov­el. But I real­ised that the cent­ral theme… is the romance. I was kind of shocked to have to admit it: I had writ­ten a romance nov­el. Once I embraced that, all the tweak­ing was easy.

The point is that this book was so fun to write, and I laughed a lot and I will prob­ably laugh a lot when record­ing it. I hope you do too.